‘Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practising again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.’

‘Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.’

‘What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens – whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.’

‘An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.’

‘But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.’

‘I don’t care about age very much.’

‘I tell my students, it’s not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What’s more difficult is to identify with someone you don’t see, who’s very far away, who’s a different colour, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.’

‘I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.’

‘I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.’